Wooden dowels in a wide variety of species of woods arc widely utilized for structural and decorative purposes in woodworking. Because of this, a large variety of techniques have been developed for producing dowels, and commercially produced dowels are widely available.
Commercial dowel production equipment, like the machine described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,770,215, is, however, complex and expensive, and commercially produced dowels vary wildly from their intended nominal diameters, are often oval rather than round in cross-section, and are available in a limited number of species of wood.
As a result, there continues to be a need for relatively inexpensive equipment capable of producing accurately sized dowels in multiple sizes and wood species, in home workshops and small commercial workshops, despite numerous prior efforts to develop such techniques and equipment. Among these prior efforts arc U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,127,452 and 4,553,575, a German dowel maker sold by Woodcraft Supply and the Fred Lambert "rounders" system described in Jack Hill's Country Chair Making by Jack Hill (Sterling 1998). Some prior devices drive a spinning workpiece through or past a stationary cutter, such as U.S. Pat. No. 4,553,575, or a spinning Cutter, such as U.S. Pat. No. 4,768,903. Others rotate a cutter about a non-rotating workpiece, as in the Stanley No. 77 dowel making machine, which rotates a cutter with a straight section and a curved section about a square cross section workpiece that is fed into the rotating cutter head without rotating the workpiece.
Virtually all prior small shop dowel making devices have utilized a single cutter blade, some of which blades have a straight cutting arris (the "edge" foxined by the intersection of the bevels that cause the cutter to be sharp) and others of which have a curved or partially curved cutting arris. This is problematic because there is always a trade-off between the "quantity" of a cut, i.e., the amount of material that a blade removes, and the quality of the surface produced by the cut.
Another problem in the art results from the manner in which cutter blades are secured in the tool in which they are used. Fixed cutter blades in woodworking tools must usually be held very firmly in order to function successfully without chattering or other problems. This is typically accomplished by clamping the blade against a fixed, substantial bed with one or more bolts that pass through one or more holes or slots in the blade or with a lever or clamping arrangement such as is used in some hand planes. These arrangements usually permit blade adjustment within the plane of the blade, by pivoting or sliding the blade relative to the bed against which it rests. However, adjustment of a blade normal to its plane and the plane of the bed against which it rests is rarely possible because it requires that the blade bed move relative to the rest of the tool. In a very different context, some bench planes make this possible with a movable frog, but prior art dowel makers have not had such capability.